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Photo credit: Derorgmas
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The Upgrading A Mac System series:
- Part 1: Hardware Purchase
- Part 2: Migration
- Part 3: Apps
- Part 4: Peripheral Hardware
In part 3 of this article series, I described my application migration story. In this part, I'm (finally) finishing up the tale by talking about my various pieces of hardware that either worked or needed to be replaced. All of the work I'm describing here was actually done in October and November, but I'm just getting around to writing about it now.
Ideally, I would like to just swap the computer and leave everything else unchanged. But life is not ideal. Over the years, Apple has changed the port configuration of the Mac mini, so not everything can just plug in. At least not without some adapters. And some devices that were perfectly great 9 years ago are old and slow by today's standards. So it's time to change up several peripherals.
What ports changed
This table provides a quick summary of what has changed (with respect to I/O ports) between a my 2011 and 2018 Mac minis:
| Port | 2011 Mac mini | 2018 Mac mini |
|---|---|---|
| Ethernet | 10/100/1000BASE-T | 10/110/1000BASE-T |
| USB | 4 USB 2.0 (480 Mbit/s) type-A | 2 USB 3.0 (5 Gbit/s) type-A 4 USB 3.1 (10 Gbit/s) type-C (shared with Thunderbolt) |
| FireWire | 1 800 Mbit/s | N/A |
| Thunderbolt | 1 Thunderbolt 1 (10 Gbps) | 4 Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) (shared with the USB 3.1 ports) |
| Video output | 1 HDMI Up to two displays via Thunderbolt |
1 HDMI 2.0 Up to two displays via Thunderbolt 3 |
| Infrared | One port (for Apple Remote only) | N/A |
| Audio input | 1 3.5mm jack (analog or optical) | N/A |
| Audio output | 1 3.5mm jack (analog or optical) | 1 3.5mm jack (analog only) |
| Card reader | 1 SD card (SDCX) | N/A |
Although there were many changes, most of them were of no consequence. I have no Thunderbolt peripherals and I use a USB device for accessing SD cards. The big problem for me is that the number of type-A USB ports dropped from 4 down to 2 and the FireWire port went away. And a surprising (and annoying) HDMI problem.
HDMI and DVI video
The one thing I didn't expect to have any problems with was my monitor. I'm using a fairly old (but working perfectly) Dell 2405 FPW display. It has a variety of digital and analog inputs, the best of which is DVI. I have been using this display for a very long time, first connected to my old PowerMac G4, then to the 2011 Mac mini (via its bundled HDMI-DVI adapter). So I connected it to the new mini using that same HDMI-DVI adapter.
It mostly works, but there's something weird going on. When the computer first powers on, I get an image, but it's the wrong size, is shifted over to the right and has a vertical line down the left side. If I use the display's OSD, it thinks the resolution is 2020x1204, which is incorrect (the actual resolution is 1920x1200). macOS, however, thinks it is outputting 1920x1200.
If I unplug the video cable and plug it in while the computer is running, then everything syncs perfectly, and the image will continue to look fine even across reboots. But if I power off the computer and power it on again with the display connected, it's back to that funky signal until I hot-plug the cable again.
This is almost certainly a firmware issue, because I even see the messed up display when viewing the pre-boot Apple logo and during firmware updates. No amount of fiddling with the display's controls or the Apple Displays preference panel can fix this. Only hot-plugging the cable.
Fortunately, I never power-off this computer. It's my household server and is therefore running 24x7. But every time a power-off (or firmware upgrade, it seems) occurs, I need to hot-plug the display again. If I really get ticked off by this in the future, I can get a USB-C DVI adapter and see if that works any better, but for now, I'm just putting up with it.
Bye Bye iSight camera
Losing the FireWire port is particularly annoying because I was using it for my iSight web camera and for three hard drives (my backup devices). The hard drives support USB 2.0, but that's a lot slower than FireWire. (Yes, USB 2.0's 480 Mbit/s is higher than FireWire's 400 Mbit/s, but USB 2.0 has much more overhead, so real-world performance on a hard drive ends up being slower.) The iSight camera has no other possible way of connecting to a Mac - it is a FireWire-only device.
Fortunately, I anticipated this and bought several adapters to allow me to connect my FireWire peripherals to this Mac. You can read about how I used this to migrate my data from the old computer in part 2 of this series of articles.
The FireWire adapters worked great for connecting my hard drives, but no success with the iSight camera. After connecting it, macOS did detect it, but it could only show me the video content. Its microphone would not work. Unfortunately, this is a bug in macOS 10.15 ("Catalina") and one that Apple is highly unlikely to ever fix, given the antiquity of the iSight camera.
Fortunately, in my pile of spare parts, I had another web camera. A Logitech C-310. This camera, being fully compliant to the USB Video device Class (UVC) is supported by macOS without requiring any additional software.
In many ways, this camera is better than the iSight. It's a 720p HD camera (compared to the iSight's 640x480) and it seems to have a much better contrast ratio. But the iSight has a mechanically-focusing lens (which can be controlled by software as well as automatic) and an integrated lens cap/power switch, so you can be certain it is off when you think it is off.
Months later, I found an article about a third-party device driver to restore iSight audio, but by the time I read that article, I was happily working with the Logitech camera and I really don't want to switch back to an SD image.
Need faster hard drives
The next problem is that my existing external hard drives (for backups) are old and slow. They are high quality server drives (Seagate Constellation and NAS drives installed in Vantec NexStar 3 USB/FireWire/eSATA enclosures), but they were put into service in 2011 and 2013, meaning they're all running on borrowed time. I could put new drives in the enclosures (two are limited to 2TB drives while the third can accept larger drives), but I would still be stuck with USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 speeds, which are really slow by today's standards and significantly slower than the drive's throughput.
So I decided to build new drives with new enclosures. I bought three 4TB Toshiba N300 NAS drives. These are 7200 RPM drives with CMR technology, rated for 24x7 operation, 1M hour MTBF and maximum sustained throughput of about 200 MB/s (1.6 Gbit/s). They're not the fastest, but they're very good and only slightly more expensive than consumer desktop drives (which are typically 5400 RPM, SMR technology and are not rated for 24x7 operation). I paid $110 for each of the three drives at a local computer store.
I installed the drives in Vantec NexStar TX USB 3.0 enclosures. These enclosures support drives up to 16 TB (far more than anything I'm likely to use), run at USB 3.0's 5 Gbit/s speed (significantly faster than the drive) and supports UASP, which greatly improves bandwidth efficiency of USB devices. I paid $20 for each of the three enclosures.
Installation of the drives in the enclosures was very straightforward. Vantec even included screwdrivers in the package, so you don't even need to have any tools!
After installation, macOS had no problem seeing the drives. I used Disk Utility to erase and format them. I chose to use Apple's 2-pass secure erase, which took several hours to erase each drive. I didn't have to, but I figure that if there are any problems with the drive, I should find them after writing data to every single sector. There were no problems.
Total cost for the three external drives came to about $400 (plus taxes, of course). I know you can buy 4TB external drives (especially portable bus-powered drives) for less money, (about $90-110 each) but these drives are not likely to be as good as what I assembled, and the price I paid isn't much more expensive. Consumer external drives are typically 5400 RPM (or slower) and are generally not rated for 24x7 operation. They usually don't advertise any MTBF rating whatsoever, so reliability is completely unknown.
Need more USB ports
OK, so we're almost up and running. But I need to be able to connect all these devices. With the old setup, I was using several USB 2.0 devices:
- Keyboard
- Mouse (plugged into the keyboard's pass-through port
- Apple SuperDrive DVD burner
- UPS
- Scanner
- Display (it has an internal USB 2.0 hub and a media card reader)
- Dock and Lightening cables for syncing my various mobile devices (iPads, iPods, iPhones, etc.)
- USB audio input for digitizing cassettes and vinyl records
On the new computer, however, I've only got two USB type-A ports. And I'm replacing my three FireWire hard drives with USB 3.0 drives and the iSight camera with a Logitech USB camera. The SuperDrive must still connect directly to the computer, so I now need to connect 10 devices to a single USB port.
Even given the fact that some devices (like the USB audio device) aren't always connected, that's still too much for a 7-port USB hub. And for the new hard drives, I really want a USB 3 hub that can handle higher speeds. So I bought an Anker 10 port USB 3.0 hub.
I have been very pleasantly surprised by this hub. Unlike other USB devices I've used over the years, this one really "just works". Massive kudos to Anker. So far, they've always delivered a high quality product.
Currently connected to this hub are:
- Time Machine backup storage. One of the three new hard drives. Connected and powered 24x7.
- Two backup hard drives sharing a port. I clone my system to these drives. I alternate between them when I make my backups. Since I never use them both together, they share a single port on the USB hub - I move the cable between the two drives as necessary.
- Keyboard, with the mouse daisy-chained off of it
- UPS
- Scanner
- Display
- Logitech web camera
- Lightening and Dock cables for my mobile devices
This gets the job done and I see good performance even with the hard drives because I'm rarely using more than one or two high speed devices at a time.
I would, however, prefer to have more than one spare port, so I'm thinking of three possible options:
- Replace the 10 port hub with a 13 port hub (it's advertised as 14 ports, but one is charging-only, without data transfer).
- Replace the Apple SuperDrive with a different optical drive that isn't bus powered, allowing me to attach a hub to the second USB type-A port
- Attach a second hub to a USB type-C port using an adapter cable
Conclusion
And that concludes my description of how I swapped out an old 2011 Mac mini for a new 2018 Mac mini. If you are planning a similar upgrade, I hope my experiences will be able to help your upgrade go a little more smoothly. And even if they don't, hopefully you will be a little less surprised if you experience the same issues.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below.
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